California-based Restoration Hardware’s CEO/Chairman Gary Friedman is known for boldly remaking the company and giving it a distinctive new vibe and look.
This week Friedman launches his newest concept, a dramatic, sun-lit Restoration Hardware design gallery in a handsome Palladian showroom in San Francisco’s design district. It’s placed beautifully behind a tall wall and a pair of grand portals, with a terrace and sunlight galore, right in the midst of top design showrooms and the finest antiques galleries.
I have long admired Gary Friedman for his fearless leap into management and ownership of Restoration Hardware.
The company was founded in 1980 to sell, what else, restoration hardware.
The original founder opened his first store and launched a quirky catalog because he was restoring a Craftsman house in Marin County in Northern California. He could not find all the authentic lighting, doorknobs, hinges, handles, and flotsam and jetsam of remodeling for a classic and historic residence. Thus the name!
The company grew, catalogs arrived through the mail, and stores were opened around the country. The design evolved and the company offered a classic range, with beautiful bed linens, good solid furniture, beautifully made basic pieces for any residence, and the kick of quirky gifts and accessories.
Gary Friedman, formerly with Williams Sonoma, boldly took over the company and has slowly and thoughtfully reshaped it.
Now he is making an even more ambitious leap—with a glamorous new showroom in a former super-luxe antiques gallery. This gallery opens September 23, with a party for 600 guests, and hundreds of new designs, furniture, lighting, antique reproductions, and singular modern and period pieces.
The new gallery is at 188 Henry Adams Street, San Francisco, in the former home of Ed Hardy San Francisco Antiques. Ed Hardy, who built this Palladian masterpiece, is knowledgeable and uniquely insightful in matters of antiques and decorative accessories, and he will stay on as a consultant.
Gary Frieman made a great splash last year by revamping the whole Resto product line. He introduced what many design fans and design bloggers have called ‘the Axel Vervoordt look’ for its insistently beige tones and neutral coloring, heavy linen upholstery, off-beat antiques, industrial findings, rusted metals and use of raw wood. (The brilliant design blogger Joni Webb of Cote de Texas wrote brilliantly and presciently about this new collection.)
In fact, this is not Antwerp-based art and antique dealer Axel Vervoordt’s look at all. Axel's look for interiors (he insists he is not a decorator) is much more rare, more refined, more subtle, more self-aware and knowing.
Axel's work for a range of international clients is always inflected with art by Lucio Fontana, a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, or Egyptian antiquities, authentic handcrafted pieces, a farm table here, a Roman or Khmer torso there, surprises, and the finest of the fine. It's expensive. You could not build a catalog truly replicating Axel—but you might use his ideas to get your creative juices flowing. He’s an excellent source for inspiration.
Axel Vervoordt and his son Boris Vervoordt (see my earlier features on the Vervoordts in THE STYLE SALONISTE archive) love and collect and offer fine paintings and beautiful antiques and fine silver and modern sculptures, and very insider collections. They love the imperfect, juxtaposed with the new. Their 'look' (though all interiors are unique) as seen in Axel’s superb books published by Rizzoli, is not loft-like or rough or industrial or even especially overscale, as Restoration Hardware’s new look was shaped.
The new Restoration Hardware look is what I would call Antwerpian loft (my own coined expression) or Brussels-esque. Maybe it’s actually Gary-esque. Brilliant.
Restoration Hardware has done a superb job of adapting a dash of Axel’s witty overscale sofas with a typical Belgian understated monochromatic décor with plain linen upholstery. And there’s Belgian flea-market rough-and-tumble antiques thrown in.
It’s a look originally presented with panache in multitudes of books published by the Beta-Plus Belgian publishing house, and in their tomes, with names like ‘Timeless Living’ and ‘Urban Retreats’ published beautifully and in multitudes. No text to speak of but highly detailed photos. These volumes have been hotly collected in design studios and merchandise design studios for some years. A secret resource. Designers love them because there are lots of easy-to-emulate and client-pleasing ideas and inspiration for product, kitchens, color, bathrooms, and décor.
But Restoration Hardware—Gary’s talented team—has used these influences and magnified them and given them muscle and character and made it its own. Now the monochromatic overscale sofa is paired with a weird office desk or a strange and fetishistic set of rusted gear objects and chrome counterpoise floor lamp. Style should be a mash-up, not a period fantasy.
Resto’s greatest new hits now include a mad and wonderful Aviator Chair with shiny riveted metal sides that looks as if it was crafted from aircraft parts and a vintage leather armchair. Love it.
There are a Royal Master Sealight Floorlamp, rusty looking mid-century Mid-Century Ship Ladder Shelving, an antique lunar map, a friendly wooden glider model, cashmere throws, a French dentist’s chair, a polyhedron model (very Belgian), lots of chairs and sofas rigorously upholstered in Belgian linen, along with a dramatic forties sling iron rocker. No pattern here. No frills.
Some might find the collection relentlessly beige. The uber-macho industrial carts and muscular rusted industrial chain pulleys and collection of fishing weights might appear a bit lacking in humor. It can get a bit heavy-handed. You can love or reject the bulky authentic ironbound antique cotton mill bins (just 235 remaining), but they are original and will last a life-time. And unquestionably the bed linens are superb (Italian, French, just perfect), and I love the towels and duvets and luxurious goose down pillows.
It takes fearless leadership and a strong point of view to pull this all together and to achieve such a strong, inviting, versatile, and cohesive look.
This new Resto offering of furniture and décor would fit right into a Colorado lodge, a Lake Tahoe cottage, a Silver Lake escape, a Rancho Santa Fe equestrian property, an Arizona retreat, or an Adirondacks cottage. Belgian linen, rough and unpretentious and classic, looks great anywhere.
A careful perusal of the pages of the new catalog (I seem to get at least one a day in my mailbox) digs up a useful French postal desk (terrific for a garage or a studio), and a chic fifties linen-upholstered Copenhagen chair, plus some bombastic beds, fake antlers, whacking big rolls of sisal/linen rugs, and enough silk and linen curtains to cover Antwerp with a Christo-like wrapping, there and back.
I hear that Restoration Hardware is going to be opening in Los Angeles on or near Melrose Avenue in the heart of the design district around the Pacific Design Center. Decorators might feel it’s a bit too close for comfort, but clients with be happy.
Light-filled galleries and chock-a-block flagships and entirely new collections are being planned at this moment. I love it.
The next thing, I think you should see hordes of Restoration Hardware furniture and décor on a TV reality show or in a celebrity house or starring on its own TV show, and its only fitting. It’s time.
Cue the lights, camera, action.
Thanks to Gary Friedman, Restoration Hardware is ready for its close-up.
Year Gary Friedman took over: 2001
Number of Restoration Hardware stores: As of September 2010, Restoration Hardware operates 97 retail stores and 11 outlet stores in 30 states, the District of Columbia and Canada.
Largest Restoration Hardware stores: The Flatiron store in NYC and the original Corte Madera store in the San Francisco Bay Area are the flagships.
About Restoration Hardware
The official—and fascinating—information on the company:
Restoration Hardware is a leading purveyor of premium home furnishings offered through a multi-channel platform that includes retail stores, catalogs (Restoration Hardware Home, Garden, Outdoor, Baby & Child, and Gift) and on-line at www.restorationhardware.com and www.rhbabyandchild.com.
Additionally, the company markets its products to the interior design trade and has a contract division targeting the hotel and hospitality industry.
The Restoration Hardware merchandise offering for Fall 2010 (and basic to all stores and catalogs) includes meticulously crafted furniture, textiles, lighting, bathware, hardware, and collections of large-scale, inspirational products handmade by an international roster of artisans. The company is owned by an investment group consisting of Catterton Partners, Tower Three Partners, Glenhill Investments, and Gary Friedman.
Original article and pictures take www.thestylesaloniste.com site
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